5 reasons I don’t tweet during conferences anymore

I’ve stopped tweeting from seminars, workshops and other live events I attend as a speaker or an audience member. Here’s why:

1. Multi-tasking, research shows, isn’t productive. In fact, the opposite is true.

If I’m in the audience to learn, and I’m busy listening, and busy tweeting, something’s got to give. If you can do both tasks exceptionally well, great. I can’t. So I won’t.

2. I don’t want to miss one valuable lesson from the speaker who’s on the platform or from things I see in the room.

At Publishing University, sponsored by the International Book Publishers Association, in March of this year, I was a member of three panels that discussed social media and online book promotion. I love hearing Dan Poynter, the self-publishing expert, and attended his presentation on Saturday morning, but arrived late. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I would have missed the clipboard he had sent around the room so audience members could give him their names and email addresses and subscribe to his ezine.

“That’s brilliant,” I thought to myself when I glanced up and saw the clipboard. When I speak, I send a basket around the room and ask for business cards if people want to subscribe to my newsletter. Problem is, people’s email addresses are sometimes old ones, or they’re not even printed on their business cards. I don’t know that until I get back to the office.

Thanks, Dan. I now use a clipboard.

3. I don’t want to have to worry about tweeting when I’m away.

Leaving for a conference for a few days and freeing myself of any social media responsibilities is actually a treat. Try it.

I don’t want to miss hearing an interesting question from an audience member who I might want to meet later for coffee.

5. When I speak at these events, it galls me to see audience members glued to their mobile phones, texting like mad.

If I had my way, I’d prohibit anyone from even bringing a phone into the room. I want to give the speaker the same courtesy I expect. That means I’m no longer going to encourage audience members to use a special hash tag, or even tweet tips from my presentation. I want their eyes on me, not their phones.

What about you? If you tweet from these events, why do you do it? If not, why not? If you’re a speaker, what do you think when you see people texting during your presentations?

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I’m glad that as a thought-leader you are willing to take this stand. I couldn’t agree more. I find it to be very distracting to be speaking while four or five people are tweeting. Although the person may mean well, they are missing a lot by switching their attention. My bet is that people who are tweeting, are also getting distracted by other things, but the justification of “I’m just helping you promote your information” is a nice way to hide the inability to focus.

I didn’t mention this in the blog post, but this is another reason I don’t tweet other people’s tips. The folks in the audience, most times, paid to be there. They also paid for a hotel and for airfare or other transportation. It never felt right to me to send information out to the world that others paid do access.

I multitask out of necessity because I wear too many hats but I truly enjoy the moments when I can divorce myself from media to focus on something I really enjoy, whether it’s a webinar, presentation, conference or spiritual meeting. Some things need our full presence, esp if we want to benefit from them fully.
In summary, I agree completely.

Looking at it from the presenter’s point of view, I’d agree with you! I’m grateful when people tweet about my presentations before and after, using a hashtag. The feedback afterwards can also be helpful.

When I’m up there in front of an audience, it is slightly unnerving to see people bent over their Blackberrys and iPhones. I don’t know if they’re live tweeting, or bored and checking their email, or what. As a speaker, you need nonverbal cues and facial feedback from your participants — are you losing your audience? Should you pick up the pace? Did they get that last point, or do they seem to need clarification? Live tweeting breaks the connection I try to make with my audience.

In my experience, looking at the live tweets that have posted after my talk, I have also found that people who live tweet my presentations often focus on superficial details, and I can see where they’re missing points mid-stream. It can get a little “high school.” I’ve had people live tweet about my appearance (in a complimentary way, still, it’s beside the point of my talk), or about the kinds of pictures I use in my slides.

I see other drawbacks with live tweets, in addition to the ones you mentioned. Some people approach live tweeting like court reporting, recording every point, and I think that’s a mistake. Once, I reiterated a point, and someone made a snarky tweet that I was repeating myself — but he was tweeting almost every statement I made! But in presentations, repeating main points is important.

I also think live tweeting can be a disservice to your Twitter followers. Your followers may appreciate your insights from a presentation they can’t attend, but when that report is coming across the stream in disjointed bits and pieces, interrupted by other tweets — well, that’s just not effective communication.

Also — Tweets evaporate, doing nothing for your personal brand. That’s a lot of effort that could be diverted into blogging. How much better would it be to take a few notes, snap a photo afterwards (with permission), and then write a blog post about your takeaways, which would elevate both you and the speaker (and wouldn’t evaporate from search engine results, the way tweets do). Then you could tweet the link to your blog post.

One thing I’ve noticed: live tweeters rarely come up to me and introduce themselves, before or after a presentation. But bloggers almost invariably do. It could be just my personal experience, but in a way, I think live tweeting can make you less social.

Mary, you’ve just presented about a half dozen more reasons why tweeting from conferences is a bad idea for all parties. I, too, have noticed that many of the tweets people send from my presentations are in the category of “superficial” and are usually examples I am using to illustrate a larger point. Thanks for your detailed response.

Like many others have already said, it’s quite disrespectful to be focused on something else when the speaker is talking.
They’ve put a lot of hard work into their presentation and it’s just rude, rude, rude to not give them your full attention.
Plus, if you’re paying for that seminar, it’s stupid, since you’re not going to get the full benefit.
I am constantly amazed at how many people think it’s okay to tweet or text during meetings and such.

Civilization got along fine for thousands of years without tweets.
Manners, on the other hand…

Trackbacks

[…] two-year-old blog post from Joan Stewart (May 2012) that is just as timely today as it was then: 5 Reasons I Don’t Tweet During Conferences Anymore. If you’re a workshop presenter, you can probably relate to #5. I’ll admit I’ve […]